Solicitor Advocate 2.0: upgrade your career by upskilling in advocacy

“David Beckham is Britain’s finest striker of a football not because of God-given talent but because he practises with a relentless application that the vast majority of less gifted players wouldn’t contemplate.”

-Sir Alex Ferguson, former Manchester United Manager

The law is a funny game, especially when it comes to the courts. For a start, lawyers spend a lot of time preparing for things that never end up happening.

Often, a long-prepared matter will settle in the week before trial, or even on the doorstep of the court. At other times, we prepare for a point that our opponents concede, or (if we are lucky) fail to take at all. We cover, if we can, every possible eventuality, and of course only a couple of them are ever realised; it can at times be like practising cricket all week only for the game to be washed out come the weekend.

Of course, the reverse situation — when you enter the fray underprepared or ill-equipped — is much worse. It can (and does) happen to the best of us, and usually when either you take over a matter because someone is ill/unavailable/has resigned, or you are the only one who can do it.

I recall doing a matter for a colleague in the dim past, which I was assured was simply handing up a couple of documents and getting a date. It turned into a full-day interlocutory application in an area with which I had little familiarity, family law. It was a ding-dong battle which involved leading and crossing witnesses based on a hasty read of their material, and diverse arguments around points of law (including whether or not reliance could be placed on a psychologist’s report, which was a first for me).

I was lucky enough to win that matter, and what made it even better is my opponent was — and still is — a great mate from law school (you bet I still remind him of it). Other times I was less fortunate; one of the early appeals I ran came to me because someone else was unavailable, and after a hurried night’s preparation I was pretty confident we were going to lose, an intuition fortified by the judge’s opening statement as to the negative attributes of my client.

My confidence was justified, and we duly lost with me on the end of the judge’s blowtorch for 45 minutes. To be fair though, the other side got a similar treatment and we were both put to the test thoroughly on our arguments, and the decision was spot-on in my view. Wasn’t much fun though!

My generation are full of such stories, because trial by fire was the way we learnt how to do court work, even in the higher courts. Apart from a few moots at Uni there was no other way to practice and prepare, you just jumped in the deep end.

These days you can learn to swim in the shallows, through the QLS Solicitor Advocate’s Course. This is a graduated course, comprising three levels involving the acquisition of increasingly more complex skill-sets. The Foundations course covers the essentials of advocacy, with the Building on Foundations Course dealing with more sophisticated advocacy. The Advanced — cross examination and argument course hones existing advocacy abilities to complete the skill-set of the experienced solicitor-advocate.

The final course for the year will be the Advanced — cross examination and argument course, to be held on 29–30 November, and registrations are now open. Anyone who already knows their way around a court room but is seeking to take on more complex work (or indeed, thinks such work might come their way anyway) should consider signing up.

Participants will become more complete, confident advocates, and increase their employability as well. In a market with more savvy and demanding clients, who are not keen to pay two lawyers for the same matter, solicitor-advocates offer great value to law firms of all sizes.

Practising and honing your craft via the Solicitor Advocate Course is a great way to get better results and value for clients, as well as increasing your own value — and you can bet Sir Alex would approve.